In Pictures: Beyond Marissa Mayer -Top women in tech

With ex-Google honcho Marissa Mayer taking the reins of Yahoo this week, she joins other prominent females in leadership roles at some of the tech industry's largest companies

Marissa Mayer being appointed president and CEO of Yahoo this week marks another female being named to a prominent position in a leading technology company. HP, IBM and Canonical already have female CEOs, while women hold senior leadership positions at organizations such as Facebook, Cisco and Oracle. Still though, a study by Harvey Nash recently found that fewer than 10% of tech CEOs are women, which is actually an improvement upon the 4% of Fortune 1000 CEOs that are female. Watch Mayer talk about the women in technology here, and click through our slideshow to see some of the top women in technology.

Marissa Mayer, president and CEO, Yahoo
Mayer was the 20th employee of Google, the company's first female engineer, and she's credited with the simple and uncluttered Google homepage search box design. Most recently she served as vice president of local, maps and location services before this week being appointed to the challenging job of digging Yahoo out of its hole.
Twitter handle: @marissamayer

Virginia Rometty, president and CEO, IBM
Rometty rose to her position at IBM in January, replacing longtime IBM exec Sam Palmisano. She joined IBM in 1981 and has served as SVP of Global Business Services and SVP and group vice president of Sales, Marketing and Strategy, where she oversaw the company's $99 billion worldwide sales last year.

Meg Whitman, president and CEO, HP
Whitman has led HP since September in a job she took after an unsuccessful bid for governor of California in 2010. Before joining HP, she served as president and CEO of eBay for 10 years until 2008, and before that held executive positions at The Walt Disney Co., Dreamworks, Procter & Gamble and Hasbro. Since her tenure at HP, she's had to make some tough choices, including a 9,000-worker cutback plan.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook
Other than founder Mark Zuckerberg, Sandberg is perhaps the most public face of the leading social networking site. Since 2008 she has led the now public company's sales, marketing, business development, legal, HR, public policy and corporate communication teams. She's had a colorful past too: Prior to joining Facebook, she served as global online sales and operations vice president at Google, as chief of staff for the U.S. Department of the Treasury and as an economist at the World Bank. How does she manage it all? According to CNN, she promptly leaves work at 5:30 p.m. daily.
Sheryl Sandberg’s Facbeook page: http://www.facebook.com/sheryl

Ursula Burns, chairman and CEO, Xerox
Burns started her career at Xerox in 1980 as a summer intern and has since worked her way to the top of the organization. In 2000, she became vice president for corporate strategic services, and was then promoted to president in 2007. In July 2009 she became CEO of the printing, IT outsourcing and consulting business and a year later became chairman of the board.

Padmasree Warrior, CTO, Cisco
Warrior, former CTO of Motorola, now heads up Cisco's 22,000-person engineering team and sets the direction for the company's strategy related to core switching, collaboration, data center virtualization and cloud computing. She attended the Indian Institute of Technology in New Dehli and received her master's degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University.
Twitter handle: @padmasree

Mitchell Baker, chairperson, Mozilla Foundation
The Mozilla Foundation provides overall leadership of the open source foundation responsible for the Mozilla Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client. Baker helped start the foundation and was one of the five original members of its board. She formerly served as CEO of Mozilla Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of the foundation that works to integrate foundation projects. She's also known as the Chief Lizard Wrangler around Mozilla, and she keeps up a blog about the open source world.

Safra Catz, co-president and CFO, Oracle
Catz serves below CEO Larry Ellison and alongside co-President Mark Hurd. She has held a variety of roles at the database giant, including as a member of the board of directors since 2001, president since 2004, and she's currently in her second stint as CFO of the company, after serving in the same role from 2005 to 2008.

Cindy Bates, vice president, U.S. Small and Medium Businesses, Microsoft
Bates oversees the end-to-end development, sales and marketing of Microsoft products for the small and mid-market clients.
Twitter handle: @cindy_bates

Renee James, SVP and GM, Intel; chairman, McAfee
James oversees the software and services group at Intel, but since 2010 when the chip-maker bought McAfee, she's had an expanded role of chairman of the security company, too.

Adriana Karaboutis, global CIO, Dell
Karaboutis was appointed global CIO of Dell in January, after serving as vice president of IT at Dell. Prior to joining the computer company in 2010, she spent more than 21 years at General Motors and Ford Motor Co.
Twitter handle: @AndiatDell

Jane Silber, CEO, Canonical
Before becoming CEO of the open source company, Silber served as COO, helping to develop the company's open source software management tools. During Silber's tenure, a goal has been to make the Ubuntu open source operating system "enterprise-ready."
Twitter handle: @silbs

Robin Bienfait, CIO, RIM
Bienfait oversees the enterprise business unit, BlackBerry operations and corporate IT, according to her company biography. She previously has worked at AT&T Labs and Global Network Services.

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